It has been a great couple of days for Wisconsin, this blog's onetime adopted home state now d/b/a a wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries, as long as you don't count what happened to the Packers, I guess. First of all, there was the triumph of Kenosha gal Laura Kaeppeler, proof positive that this blog went to college out there 40 years too soon. And now it appears that over a million ravens have come rap-tap-tapping on the chamber door belonging to goggle-eyed homunculus Scotty Walker who, courageously, was out of town today, raising money in New York. This he did with the profound political acumen that he has demonstrated throughout this whole affair:

Walker is scheduled to hold a New York City fundraiser in the afternoon hosted by Maurice Greenberg, the founder of financial services corporation American International Group, according to a copy of the fundraising solicitation posted on the website of the New York Daily News.

On the day that his state rose up and hocked a loogie in his general direction, Scotty Walker was in the Big Apple, raising money with the founder of AIG — a guy with his own checkered history — the company which, if this were a just world, would have its corporate logo serve as the official collective mugshot of the criminals and grifters and dunces who almost wrecked the world's economy. The company that paid its executives $165 million in bonuses a year after all of us bailed their sorry asses out? I mean, what the fk, Scotty? Was the banquet hall in the old Enron building booked? Was there a dinner-dance scheduled in the the grand ballroom of the Waldorf Ebola?

It is not to deny the astonishing levels of organization and stamina it took to gather a million signatures right at the beginning of the dead of winter to say that the really hard part begins now. There will be challenge after challenge as the targets of these signatures go haring off through the Wisconsin judiciary looking for friendly judges. There will even be some criticism of the whole affair as being too costly in The Era Of Great Deficits. And I suspect that not even the people who've been working this effort friom the state have any idea of the level of dirty tricks that are about get played out across the state. The most critical requirement right now is that the Democratic party in Wisconsin avoid a primary at all costs. Get a candidate and fall in behind him. (This assumes that the pro-Walker people will find themselves a straw dog to run as a Democrat, but there's nothing the Democrats can do about that.) The relationship between some of the Recall people and the state party never has been cuddly. Some of the former were in the fight while the latter was still ponderously trying to make up its mind. All of that has to be left behind. Everybody has to get along if they want what they say they want. The entire conservative world is going to rally around Scotty Walker. Eyes on the prize, folks.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Walker administration, criminal matters advance apace. Miss Kaeppeler says that one of her main projects as Miss America will be to work with the children of incarcerated parents. (Her father did a stretch for mail fraud.) She may have some new clients sooner than she thinks.